He rose at 6 a.m. Thursday, started packing at 6:30, and now, with a few minutes to spare before Salinas sanitation workers start demolishing encampments in Chinatown, his brother is nowhere to be found. He took the shopping cart Aguirre intends to use to transport his possessions to a safe place — a parking lot next to Dorothy's Place on Soledad Street.

"My brother didn't bring the basket back," he said. "I told him I can't get this out, I need the basket back."

So he waits for his brother to return, accuses him of being selfish, and looks over at the bulldozers that are already tearing down camps on the lot next door.

"There's not enough shopping carts to go around here," he said.

Salinas sanitation workers conducted a routine sweep of Chinatown starting at 8 a.m. Thursday, an activity that takes place about every six months. Bulldozers tear up the shelters built with pallets and tarps, picking up everything from couches and mattresses to clothes, brooms, bicycles and dishes.

Salinas administrators give Chinatown dwellers about two weeks' advance notice of the cleanup. This time around, Franciscan Workers of Junipero Serra, which operates Dorothy's Place, asked for donations of boxes, containers and other materials to help residents pack their belongings.

But by the time the demolition crews arrived in the morning, few had packed and left. Mercedes Ruiz, 29, wasn't one of them.

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," she said as she dragged her clothes out of the encampment and onto a side street. Ruiz didn't know if her belongings would be safe there.

"It's all material stuff," she said, shrugging her shoulders and smiling. "I've done it, people have done it over and over again."

The cleanups take place when the local safety and sanitation team calls on the city to clean up accumulated debris, said Don Reynolds, a project manager for Salinas city.

"We know everybody is going to be back," said Gary Petersen, public works director with the city of Salinas. But by the time Chinatown dwellers return, gone will be the needles, the human waste and the trash that poses a health hazard for everyone, Petersen said. The city had three bulldozers and four dump trucks to do the job. Fifty loads of garbage were taken to the dump by the end of the day, Petersen said.

Salinas administrators are in the process of leasing a building in Chinatown to provide services for the population living there, Reynolds said. They've already purchased a building on Soledad Street.

Aguirre overhears Reynolds' comment on services and snorts.

"Services. The only services people give is pointing fingers. Go over there, go over there," the 53-year-old man said. "The only good thing I've seen so far is the Obama medical card. I'm extremely grateful for medical care. Without medical insurance, a lot of us will be sick."

A lot of people who live in Chinatown are mentally ill, Aguirre said, and there are no places to wash your hands or use the restroom, so people defecate in alleyways or the streets.

"You can see for yourself what cleanup looks like," he said. "Everybody has a lot of junk."

Dorothy's Place workers arranged for the Chinatown residents to store their belongings temporarily at a lot owned by CSU Monterey Bay. Users were given a plastic container and three boxes so they could easily transport and store their possessions. No plastic bags would be allowed, to minimize the risk to Dorothy's workers and prevent them from getting cut or poked by needles.

By 9:30 a.m., only 30 out of 100 people who had signed up had taken advantage of the service.

"We can't take mattresses," said Diana Almanza, director of Dorothy's. "They have (mites) or bed bugs, it's just not moral to expose my staff."

But the limited storage space at the CSUMB lot makes it unappealing to would-be users, who have crammed their meager belongings in shopping carts and wrapped them as best as they could with tarps that used to be their roofs. Not everyone took advantage of the moving boxes provided. After all, you don't end up living in the streets by planning ahead.

Salinas workers note that there is a lot more stuff accumulated for this cleanup than previous ones. Aguirre agrees. He has never seen so many people living in the streets, he said.

"Nobody was there for a whole year, I was there by myself," he said, referring to the spot he had on Market Way, the shelter he'd built for himself propped up against a fence a block away from Dorothy's Place.

Standing outside Dorothy's, Aguirre contemplates the bulldozers tearing up what used to be the homes of his friends and frowns.

"See those leather couches? How do you think they got here?" he said.

Everyone uses Chinatown as their dump, he said.

Aguirre's uncle lent him a shopping cart to move his belongings. He took two trips to move boxes stuffed with clothes, tent, sleeping pads, cooking utensils, a broom. He propped them against the fence outside the CSUMB lot and walked over to Dorothy's to get a cup of coffee and a croissant. Later he had to move them again because sanitation workers were going to bulldoze the items propped against that fence too.

"I don't know what the city's going to do with all the homeless people; there's an epidemic in California," he said. "We never used to have people living on the streets. Now there's even families living in cars."